That Time I Learned the First Woman I Fell in Love With Ended Her Own Life
A remembrance of unrequited love
I met her more than 40 years ago at a freshman dorm mixer in college. When I saw her a few days later in the elevator as it opened on our floor and I met her gaze, I leapt like a track hurdler into the open elevator over two guys wrestling like fools in front of the doors. She smiled knowingly at the maneuver.
She was stunningly beautiful. I told her once she reminded me of Ali McGraw. Her intelligence left me mesmerized.
We hung out for a few months. We went to a football game and drank Schnapps in the frozen bleachers. We drank tequila sunrises at night and danced at the next mixer, and spent hours on weekday evenings talking about everything that young college kids, excited to be free from their homes and eager to explore the universe, talk about. Sometimes we’d just study silently together, but my silence was filled with a crippling static created by an inability to take my eyes off her and her long dark brown hair as my deepening longing for her began to intercede with basic motor functions.
We never consummated our relationship, but it wasn’t a friend zone platonic thing. I was just young and stupid, unable to read female signals, and I have never been the type of man who “puts the moves on” a woman. There’s a time for a kiss, and I had not yet developed an instinct for evaluating such nuance.
I was a freshman in college but I possessed the emotional and romantic maturity of a sixth-grader. And. I was also a virgin. My only sexual forays had been a few easily forgotten sloppy kisses forged by blinding storms of alcohol.
This is how pathetic I was: One day during lunch I saw her in the cafeteria. She always knew what time I would be there and so she lay in wait for me, leaning against the wall wearing a blue work shirt tied above her navel, giving me the kind of look only an idiot would not recognize. God, she looked ravishing. My heart pounded when I saw her. She said to me, “You left your spoon in my dorm room the other night.”
This was true. I had left it there after one of our tequila sunrise marathons, although that fact had slipped past me. After all, it was just a spoon.
Anyway, she strongly suggested that it would be a good idea if I picked it up that evening. Oh, and by the way, she offered, her roommate would be away. Seriously? Pick up a spoon?
By this time, I suspect I was figuring it out — I don’t recall. I think it is possible we had a bit too much to drink that night because I don’t remember her giving me any signals, and I certainly didn’t make any aggressive moves. The night is a bit of a haze. Because tequila.
This wasn’t our last moment together, but shortly after, her eyes began to wander and I lacked the confidence I gained later in life on how to fight for a woman’s attention.
As time advanced, I regretted not so much that we never consummated our relationship but that her heart had never been as captivated with mine as mine was with hers, and we went our separate ways; remaining friendly, chatting once in a while, but never really maintaining a friendship, because our relationship was never meant to be platonic.
Under different circumstances, I think she would have waited for me to figure out the romantic angle. But the real problem was that I was a partier, a guy who smoked weed every day, and I wore that, literally, on my sleeve. My fellow partiers on my floor and I had even formed a pot club boasting about our habit, wearing our pot club t-shirts as if on a dare to the authorities to stop us.
She, on the other hand, was a dedicated student. She eventually graduated with our university’s highest honors. I got by as best I could, attending class when necessary, with little interest in studies. She loved my brain, I know this now, but didn’t love how I used it.
She gave me a ride one day to my grandmother’s house during Christmas break because my grandmother lived in her hometown. I was sad during the entire drive because I knew “it was over,” that our once electrical connection had been broken by my stunning ineptitude. Worse, I felt completely outclassed by her. Like she was a superior being, and I was a fool for my silly attempt to enter her domain.
I clumsily tried to salvage things anyway by suggesting we get together after break, but she declined, just like I knew she would.
If I had possessed more emotional maturity, I would have stopped smoking weed for this woman. I would have done anything if I knew the things I know now, but my addictive personality had created a jailhouse of foolishness.
One of my best friends at the time was a campus ladies’ man. He would know how to handle this woman, I often thought. One day about a year after that ride home she walked past us as my friend and I were sitting in the dorm cafeteria and gave me a surprisingly coquettish look as she said hello.
My friend, ever astute in these ways, immediately said through one of his salacious smiles after she passed, “You two got a history?” Pathetically, I said, “I wish.”
If this had all been a romcom, you’d have wanted my character killed off.
After college, I quit smoking weed, but still drank too much and didn’t really find myself until I was about thirty. Eventually, I figured lots of things out. I made a good career(s) for myself and occasionally wondered about this first love, unrequited though it may have been. I knew through the grapevine that she went on to a successful career of her own, started long before mine, while I was still drifting and digging quarters out of my couch.
I occasionally looked back and wondered what might have happened had I allowed myself to be inspired by her and had dedicated myself to studies the way she did. These were brief wanderings. They never went far. I didn’t imagine having a family with her, because I was never convinced that she shared the feelings I had. I was but a brief flicker, I assumed, long forgotten, in her life.
Then, one day not long ago, in an almost serendipitous fashion, I found out she had died a couple of years ago. I thought to myself, well, she was still not very old, so I wondered why. Was it cancer? That gets so many of us before our time, it seems. So I began a very brief investigation and quickly discovered she had been killed by a commuter train.
The authorities ruled it a suicide.
What awful pain, I wondered, caused her to do this? She had been happily married, her obit said, although she didn’t seem to have any surviving children. From what I knew about her as a youth, I guessed that to be a conscious decision. She was ambitious, and I could easily imagine her not wanting children that might have decelerated her career. Did she lose a child? I don’t know. I won’t investigate this, because I value her privacy and that of her husband.
Of all the people I knew early in life, she was absolutely the very last I would have thought would take her own life.
The overriding thought I had was, hadn’t she lived the perfect life I had imagined for her?
My emotions about this extend far beyond the fact that she was a peer. The longing disappeared a long, long time ago, but curiosity about her life remained because as I struggled with my imperfections before discovering my ambition, I considered her a nearly perfect example of how to move forward in life. As my career came into focus, I sometimes used my knowledge of her early life as motivation.
No matter what pain or sorrow she was feeling, I hope she now knows that she provided that to me.
She was almost exactly my age at the time she took her life (we were both first-year college students when we met, and her birthday was in the same month as mine), and attended the same university. She also shared my ideals as the friend I now consider her to be.
She even dedicated her later years to the type of charitable concern I care about.
Yes, she probably forgot about me entirely during her lifetime of what I thought was a successful career, but sometimes friendship is a one-way street.
She knew I wanted to be a writer. I believe that is one reason she, for a while, was willing to overlook my recklessness and irresponsibility.
I didn’t set a career in motion as a writer until after I completed my career as an art director and later software engineer. Until now, in other words. This is not a bad thing. I’ve matured slowly.
I didn’t have much to offer the world as a writer in my youth, unlike the Amanda Gormans of the world who are blessed with stunning, instinctive wisdom at an early age.
But now, I feel like I am in stage three of life. The first was one of ineptitude, struggle, and even survival. The second was career management and two marriages. The third will be about finishing what I started so long ago. I have always maintained a writing habit, but now I am determined for my voice to be heard.
Whether that happens is out of my hands. My first novel was published shortly after I learned about her death. It’s not a bestseller, but my voice is now part of the world’s literary ether. I know that I will keep writing no matter how many people read my work and that sometimes, the writing will be for her, as well as other people who’ve come and gone.
Words will form and it’s possible a few will be for my first love — a love from so long ago that many of my memories of her are lost in that strange fog created by adolescence and time, and no, not at all my best love. But because it was love, it was meaningful and will outlast both of us as it spirals around the universe.
I desperately hope that whatever she experienced in life that prompted her to end it, she has found peace in her final answer. I hope she somehow knows that these words honor her with a benediction to the brief joy she gave to me, certain in my knowledge that she did the same for others, no matter what she thought of herself during her final moments.
Heartbreaking and beautiful. I dont understand...but there have been times in my life when I did. A good counselor helped me dissect the issues and throw them away. I enjoyed your column so much.